Twitter announced updates to its Android, iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps today, as well as its desktop and mobile websites, plus TweetDeck. The main improvement isn’t a huge change, but it does eliminate one of the most annoying aspects of the apps — namely, the fact that they couldn’t tell if you had read a Direct Message on a different device or app.
In other words, if you read a direct message on Twitter for Mac (for example), then opened up Twitter for iPhone, the DM would still show up as unread. I don’t think it ruined the Twitter experience for anyone, but even for someone like me, who doesn’t get too many DMs and gave up on the “inbox zero” instinct years ago, seeing those read-yet-unread messages could be pretty exasperating.
Thanks to today’s updates Twitter says that issue is going away — though you’ll need to make sure you have the latest version of whatever apps you’re using in order for the changes to take effect. I tried it out myself, and seeing Twitter accurately reflect my reading behavior made me pretty happy.
In addition, Twitter says its mobile apps have an improved search experience, with full bios when you search for people, and a “similar accounts” preview. And the iPhone version includes a new “tweet composer” (shown above) that allows you to reply to a tweet without jumping to a new window (so you can see the context for your reply as you type it). It’s also supposed to include a new “people” button in the navigation bar, though I’m not actually seeing that one yet.